Chapter 68: information
The sun was already up when Kian opened the massive front door, throwing a thin, harsh glare across the polished floors of the foyer.
The house was dead quiet. No clinking coffee cups, no television hum, no footsteps from upstairs.
He pulled off his jacket, his body aching with a heavy, bone-deep exhaustion that made his eyes burn.
He expected Alice to be waiting on the sofa with her arms crossed, ready to demand where he’d been all night. He’d spent the drive back rehearsing excuses, building a wall of defensive lies to throw in her face.
Instead, Aria walked out from the side hallway carrying a small feather duster. She stopped when she saw him, her soft face opening into a brief, welcoming smile.
"Good morning, Kian," she said quietly. "You’re back early."
Kian rubbed the bridge of his nose, his throat dry. "Where’s Alice?"
"Oh." Aria tilted her head slightly. "She went out yesterday afternoon with her friends. I don’t think she came back last night."
A sudden, sharp wave of relief washed over Kian, so strong his shoulders visibly dropped.
He didn’t have to explain anything. He didn’t have to sit through her sharp, suspicious questions or pretend he was a loyal husband.
"Right," he muttered, running a hand through his messy hair. "Good."
"Do you want me to ask the kitchen staff to make you breakfast?" Aria offered, stepping closer. "Or some coffee?"
"No," Kian said, turning toward the stairs. "No, I just... I need to sleep. Don’t let anyone disturb me."
He headed up the carpeted steps, every tread feeling like a chore. He opened his bedroom door, kicked it shut behind him, and unbuttoned his shirt.
As the fabric dropped to the floor, his mind unspooled, dragging him right back to the hotel room from hours before.
The memory of the young hotel staff girl hit him like a bad taste in his mouth. He could still feel the heat of her skin, the panicked, eager way she’d moved beneath him, and the empty, hollow feeling in his gut right after he finished.
It wasn’t about her. It was about how low he was slipping. He hated himself for it. It made his skin crawl with a cold, greasy disgust, and no matter how hard he tried to shake the image out of his head, it stuck to him.
He grabbed a fresh shirt from the closet, intending to strip off his trousers and head straight into the shower to scrub the night off his skin.
Then his phone vibrated against the wooden nightstand.
Kian walked over, his chest tightening as he saw the familiar, unlisted digits flashing on the screen. He answered and brought the phone to his ear without saying a word.
"We have it," the voice on the line said, flat and stripped of any emotion. "We tracked her."
Kian held his breath. "Where?"
"Moscow. She’s at Kazarov’s main estate outside the city."
The name hit Kian like a physical blow. The air went thin in his lungs. Moscow. Not just somewhere in Europe, not a private villa in the south, his home turf. The stronghold.
"It’s a fortress," the operative continued over the crackle of the static. "Heavy security on the gates, perimeter checks every fifteen minutes, armed guards on the access roads. She’s locked down tight inside."
Kian’s hand clamped around the casing of his phone so hard his knuckles turned white. Anger, thick and suffocating, boiled up in his chest.
He reached into his pocket with his free hand, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it with a trembling thumb. He dragged the smoke deep into his lungs, but it did nothing to cool the fire under his skin.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to break the glass table in front of him, to tear something apart with his bare hands.
Russia. Aaron had taken his wife to Russia, right into his own back yard, as if to prove that Kian couldn’t touch her if he tried for a hundred years.
"What do you want us to do?" the man asked through the speaker. "Do we pull back?"
Kian stared at the gray smoke rising from the tip of his cigarette. He couldn’t storm the place. He wasn’t an idiot.
Storming the Kingston place had been a gamble that nearly wrecked him, and doing something like that on Russian soil would get him buried in a ditch.
He had a company to run. He had a clean, respectable image he’d spent years building, and he couldn’t afford to look like a desperate savage.
"No," Kian growled, his voice low and raspy. "Stay where you are. Keep watching."
"Sir, the security around that perimeter is tight, "
"I don’t care," Kian snapped, his jaw clenching. "Watch the gates. Log every car that comes out. Every time she steps outside, I want to know about it. Do you understand me?"
"Understood."
The line went dead. Kian stood in the quiet room, the cigarette burning down near his fingers. He pulled another long drag, staring blankly at the wall, forcing his breathing to slow down, forcing his muscles to unclench before he snapped completely.
A few thousand miles away, on a quiet, narrow dirt road cut through a thick stand of pine trees, a black sedan sat parked under the shadow of a heavy canopy.
The man in the passenger seat lowered his phone from his ear and let out a long, foggy breath into the chilly morning air. He was wearing a dark, thick beanie pulled low over his forehead and a heavy black jacket.
He opened the car door, stepped out into the crisp air, and leaned back against the frame, rubbing his tired face.
The driver’s side door clicked open, and a second man popped his head out, shivering against the breeze. "Well? What did the boss say?"
The man in the beanie groaned, pulling his collar up. "He wants us to stay. Keep watching the main gates."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" The driver threw his hands up in frustration. "It’s freezing out here! We’ve been sitting in this damn car for ten hours, drinking stale coffee, looking at a wall of trees and a gate that hasn’t opened once!"
"Hey," the man in the beanie said, turning to glare at him. "Shut your mouth and get back inside."
"I’m just saying, it’s stupid," the driver muttered, pulling his coat tighter as he ducked back into the car. "The guy’s rich. He could hire a satellite or something. Why do we have to sit here like idiots?"
"Because he pays the bill," the man in the beanie said, sliding back into the passenger seat and pulling the door shut with a heavy thud. "Our opinion doesn’t mean shit. You want the money, you sit here and look at the trees."
Neither of them noticed the small, grey lens mounted high in the thick branches of an oak tree twenty yards behind their rear bumper.
Inside a high-tech security station buried beneath the main house of the Kazarov estate, that exact lens was feeding a clear, high-definition image onto a bank of monitors.
A guard sat in a leather chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, watching the black sedan. He tapped a button on his console.
"They’re still sitting on the north access road," the guard reported into his headset. "Two men. Standard surveillance setup. No heavy weapons visible."
In the grand dressing room on the second floor of the main house, Pyotr stood near the window, holding a heavy tablet in one hand.
He listened to the report, nodded once, and ended the feed before looking over at the man standing in front of the full-length mirror.
Aaron Kazarov was putting on his dark wool coat, adjusting the heavy silver cufflinks on his sleeves. He looked rested, calm, and entirely unimpressed by the world around him.
"The local security team just called it in," Pyotr said, his voice flat. "Kian’s boys are still parked out in the woods by the north gate. They’ve been there since last night."
Aaron didn’t even turn his head. He adjusted the lapels of his coat with steady, deliberate hands. "They haven’t tried to cross the boundary line?"
"No. Just watching." Pyotr tapped the screen. "Should I have the perimeter guards clear them out? It’ll take five minutes."
A slow, faint smile touched the corner of Aaron’s mouth. "No. Leave them."